When Tears Meet Sea

On mindful mourning and heeding the restless call of our spirits in times of grief.

My soul has been thirsting for water.

I’ve been aching to sit by the expansive lake where I grew up, smelling the musty blend of earth and water, feeling the breeze dance over its surface, listening to the gentle lap of its waves meet shore and the whisper of the wind through the weeping willows behind.

Or to go to the ocean near where I now live, burrowing my feet into softness and letting the tides pull my heartache from me to their mysterious depths. Letting the endless blues soothe the heaviness of my heart.

This yearning to run to water, to something vastly greater than myself, where the salt of my tears feels at home in the salt of the sea – it pulls like need, not desire. When the heart aches, nature awaits, beckoning, ready to both receive and to give¹.

And so we pack the car, my partner and I. Haphazardly tossing clothing and computer and sandals inside, grabbing grapes to munch on the drive. Stopping with reverence to pack a sealed letter from our recently passed closer-than-a-brother friend / chosen family, the unopened chocolate shipped from Belgium he gave me for my recent birthday, the final video message he left behind for us to view.

I run my fingers tenderly over our names, printed carefully on the front of the envelope in his own hand. The last message we will receive. I’m struck by the thickness of the envelope. I’ve been drawn yet resistant to this final message – avoiding it feels like holding on, like desired denial, and yet I long for just one more piece of him to cherish. When the video is viewed and the letter is read, there will be no more. It will truly be over.

And then I have to let him go.

I don’t want to let go.

I want him here on this beach trip, like so many beach trips shared before. He loved the ocean as much as I did. I want to compare notes – I know he’s visited this seaside town. I wonder, did he sit in this seat, when he came to this café?

I sit with my coffee, shivering in the oceanside breeze. My eyes take in the fuchsia hollyhocks towering above, my ears the trickling of water from a fountain behind. Light fragments around me as leaves filter its warmth and I shift, seeking comfort in the sun. I read a poem aloud to my husband, a poem about grief, about beauty, about both². My voice breaks, becoming high and wavery, working its way past the mound in my throat, but I press through. He reaches and clasps my hand. I squeeze it hard and don’t let go. Tears fall and blot and reshape paper – some things can never be made the same again.

We take bicycles and pedal along the coast. A man’s figure catches my eye, my head snapping to the side. “I thought it was him,” I admit to my husband. “I know,” he says, “me too.”

I stop and gather flowers, vibrant hues with petals soft and fragile. Life is so fragile. A lone feather lays before my feet where I stop. Like the feather I found on my doorstep the first morning after he’d passed. A message from a recently deceased loved one, the first ancestors of our land explain. I tenderly gather the feather with my flowers, place them in the basket. We bike onward to a place where the shoreline rocks soften into sand, leave our bikes, descend.

A driftwood log faces the sea, and we go to it. I write his name in the sand. Below, smaller, with the tip of the feather, the dates that marked his life. So short. Painfully finite. I hate, resent, loathe that final date. I stare at that dash in between. So much hidden in that small line.

Here, at the sea, I let the tears I’ve been carrying release. Where ocean meets mist meets cheeks, my sorrow finds home. We read the letter, page after page. Slowly, savoring each word, not wanting to come to the end. But there is an end. Love always, he signs it.

Because love never dies. When all is stripped away – his impressive accomplishments, prestigious career, soaring intelligence, sharp wit – the love always remained. It still does.

We sit, mostly in silence, as the sky shifts from blue and gold to pink and orange, until we can gaze straight out at the western horizon without looking away. I lay my flowers there, gently patting their stems into sand, and then we turn and surrender our memorial to the tides.

In the morning the beach is clear. Even the log – an ancient towering tree trunk of years past – has been tossed far to the side. The ocean, as life, is as brutal as it is beautiful.

Mindful grieving is a form of self-care in the darkest of times. Where do you go when your heart breaks? How do you let yourself mourn? What rituals can you create to process losses of people, places, stages in life? What beauty can you allow yourself to notice amidst all that aches?

1. https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg26334992-900-why-taking-our-grief-out-into-nature-can-help-us-heal/ ↩︎
2. Adrift
   Everything is beautiful and I am so sad.
   This is how the heart makes a duet of
   wonder and grief. The light spraying
   through the lace of the fern is as delicate
   as the fibers of memory forming their web
   around the knot in my throat. The breeze
   makes the birds move from branch to branch
   as this ache makes me look for those I’ve lost
   in the next room, in the next song, in the laugh
   of the next stranger. In the very center, under
   it all, what we have that no one can take
   away and all that we’ve lost face each other.
   It is there that I’m adrift, feeling punctured
   by a holiness that exists inside everything.
   I am so sad and everything is beautiful.
   – Mark Nepo ↩︎